


To Let The World Pull Them Apart

by flawsinthevoodoo



Series: Compass!AU [1]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Marriage, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 18:03:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5100404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawsinthevoodoo/pseuds/flawsinthevoodoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone is born with a Compass in their arm that will point the way to their soulmate, their North. When Danny is Seven he wonders if he'll ever find his North. When he is fifteen he doesn't care. When he is thirty three he is finally complete. This is the story of that journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Let The World Pull Them Apart

**Author's Note:**

> Liberties were taken with the both the persons depicted and pretty much all of the Hockey in here, I tried to keep it vaguely consistent within a season and then gave up a twisted the world to match my wants and needs instead.

When Danny is seven he asks his mother about the compass in her arm. It is broad and blunt with flowers made of up oddly geometric shapes in warm shades of brown, blue, and green. It is beautiful, but confusing. Its face is blank, no lettering, no needle. Every adult that young Danny has ever known has had a needle to point them to their North; how else would you find your perfect mate? His mother had smiled sweetly at him, chucked him under the chin and given him a cookie. He didn’t know what that meant, but he wasn’t going to argue with a cookie, so he left blank compasses as a mystery for another day.

 

He asks again when he is eight, choosing to bother his father instead. He is armed this time with knowledge copied out painstakingly from library books he had snuck out of the adult section. The books had said there was something wrong with compasses with no needles, that people without them, called Nulls in the book, couldn’t be happy. But that didn’t make any sense to Danny; no one in his school had a needle, and they were all happy. The books were confusing, which was probably why they were in the adult section of the library. His father’s face freezes when he asks and he looks like he did the time Danny fell on the ice and had to go get stitches. Danny will remember that moment later and realize the look on his face was fear. This time, instead of a smile and a cookie, Danny finds himself sitting at the dinner table, the afternoon sun warming his back, staring across at his parents where they sit, forearms bare, hands intertwined. From where he sits he can see his father’s dark cubic needle pointing steadily at his mother.  That is the day he learns that fairytales can be lies, it is a lesson written in the loving lines of his parents’ bodies as they hug, in the gentleness of their smiles, in the blank face of his mother’s compass where his father bends to give it a kiss. He is not her North but she is his and that is enough.

 

When Danny is ten, Marc-André tells everyone at recess that Nulls are an abomination against The Diviner. He is grinning at all of the attention that prim proclamation gets him; he does not see Danny’s fist until it breaks his glasses and, shortly thereafter, his nose. Danny get suspended for it but feels a subtle sense of victory, and no amount of scolding makes him feel like he did the wrong thing there.

 

When Danny is fourteen, he is the only one in his class who hasn’t grown in his needle yet. He watches his mother’s face get tighter with stress as the months pass and his compass face remains blank. They go to a specialist who tells them he might be a late bloomer, and another who looks at Danny with pity on her face as she tells his mother she might want to look into compass covers. He gets one and pours all of his anxiety and his rage at the unfairness of it all into hockey.

 

By the time he is seventeen he has been wearing a compass cover for two years straight and is known by his teammates as a jovial guy with a chip on his shoulders about Norths. They rag on him for not trying to pick up at Match-Finds, not compass checking subtly when a particularly hot chick comes into a bar, but after the first few commenters are met with stiff shoulders and a stiffer smile, people leave him alone about the cover.

 

When he is eighteen he meets Sylvie. Sylvie changes everything.

* * *

 

Danny is under no illusions that Sylvie is his North, but her smile makes him feel something tight in his chest and he outgrew fairytale endings years ago. So when a shy brunette in heels gives him a smile at the bar he doesn't think before he buys her a drink and asks her name. Later, lying in his bed, slick with sweat and sated, he thinks that she is better than any hypothetical could be. She's nothing that he would have thought he wanted, but somehow he finds himself calling her back, asking for a second date then a third. He learns that she had wanted to be an academic but didn't have the temperament, and that she had nearly burnt her mother's kitchen down trying to bake a cake when she was thirteen. They talk late into the night about anything and everything that strikes their fancy, and Danny cannot find it in himself to believe a relationship with some preordained soulmate could be better than the thing that they are building, blooming bright and hopeful between them.

Regardless of the uncertainty of their future and the constant chirping of his teammates, Danny stops picking up when he goes out with the guys, not even trying to hide how uninterested he is. When he finds himself on a long stretch of home games, sitting in a once empty apartment now filled with her scattered belongings, he asks her to move in. Danny feels a quiet sense of joy each time he comes home to find the lights on and dinner waiting in the oven, is pleased each time he finds some of her clothing mixed in with his own when he's packing, and cannot help his proud little grin when he looks at the rooms that they decorated together. He starts getting called up by the Yotes more frequently, he has a beautiful intelligent woman who wants to share his life with him, and he feels like nothing can touch him.

 

Danny feels safe in blaming Doaner for he and Sylvie’s first fight, though he is pretty sure Sylvie might not feel the same way. He and Shane are road roommates. He likes the guy, but getting him out of the room so he can call Sylvie can be a real chore, and some nights when he’s already a couple of drinks in and he’s burnt off of all of the adrenaline from the game, he really can’t muster up the effort to get the room to himself. He always tells himself that he will call her in the morning, that she knows he’s thinking of her, and that tactic works for the first few times but, over time, not calling becomes more the norm than the exception. As is her nature, Sylvie eventually calls him on his bullshit, something he loves and hates about her. What starts as a relatively civil argument devolves first into screaming, then eventually laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation. After that they decide to spend the night doing something a little more… fun. Afterwards, lying there with his compass arm still wrapped in guard-tape from practice, Danny wonders what the hell about a soulbond could be better than this.

 

He has always kept his left arm wrapped, and her right stays garbed in a variety of fashionable sheaths. Neither of them bring up their compasses, something that Danny's mother finds peculiar when she asks, but Danny finds a blessing. He doesn’t want to see, written indelibly on her arm, that she belongs to someone else when he belongs to no one.  He doesn’t want to know if she is just biding her time or making something real and solid here with him. The coverings make it all the easier to ignore the niggling discomfort he has always felt when confronted with compasses.

 

He comes home after a losing streak that just won't end, wanting to think about anything but third period turnovers and shots wide of the net, to find Sylvie sitting hunched over on their couch. Her tear-stained face and red-rimmed eyes are like a punch to the gut, but her tentative smile convinces him the world hasn't ended. He will later laugh at himself, but when he sees her sitting there like that he thinks for a second that they are over, that she has found her North and he wasn't enough. He almost blurts that out, suddenly jittery and full of adrenaline, but she cuts him off before he begins. She's pregnant and she wants to keep it.

They haven't discussed kids and this is out of left field because Danny thought that they had been careful enough not to have this problem, but he loves her and something in him fills with joy at the thought of a little boy or girl with his eyes and her smile. He asks her to marry him then and there, having to run to the bedroom to get the ring he had stashed months ago.

 

Her parents are understandably upset about it, out-of-Bond marriages are looked down on and children from a non-Bonded pair are almost unheard of, but the idea of a forthcoming grandchild soothed their ruffled feathers, and if Danny was subjected to more lectures than he thought possible, he was happy to take them because he was happier than he could ever could have imagined.

He thought he would burst with joy when he saw Sylvie walking down the aisle, and that was nothing compared to six months later, when he held the squirming, wailing, precious bundle that was their child.

 

Figuring out how to raise a child is really not something Danny has ever put a whole lot of thought into, but now that it is something looming large in his life he finds himself beginning to wish he had a plan for this. Hell, he would have settled for a vague outline of how this was all supposed to go. The third time that he finds himself wandering aimlessly through the children’s section in a store, he surrenders and calls his sister, more willing to endure her endless teasing than to drown in this pastel hell of baby-sized items.

* * *

Not long after Caelan made three, Danny's first love started up again and he threw himself into it with his usual fervor, powered by toothless smiles and the smell of formula in baby-soft hair. He was called up, then sent down every other week, rinse and repeat, a cycle he had grown familiar with, as had Sylvie. But habits that worked for a hockey player and his live-in girlfriend were near-impossible for a family with a newborn.

They adjust like they've done with everything else, and new habits grow where old ones fall. Less than a year later, Sylvie meets him, bright eyes and grinning, with a little stick telling him their family was growing again. Carson makes him no less deliriously happy, though having two children under the age of two starts taking its toll on their sleep patterns. Sylvie tells him, one night that is almost morning, that she doesn't think she's going back to work when her maternity leave runs out. He wonders when their passion turned to affection tempered by the screaming of an infant and the tantrums of a toddler. His mother had warned him, children changed relationships, but he hadn't even noticed as the quirky, passionate woman he had married had shifted into the harried, determined mother he shared a bed with on the nights he was home. He felt discontent but couldn't pin down a cause, and he refused to spend any of his time with his family worrying about an intangible when he had a perfectly tangible stain on the living room floor to deal with.

Where Caelan had been a surprise, Carson a delight, Cameron is an attempt to bridge the growing gap between stay-at-home hockey wife and hockey player. While Cameron is just as beloved by Danny as the previous two, the gap between he and Sylvie continues to grow. He knows his part of this play, so he becomes as close a mimicry of an attentive spouse as possible and Sylvie does the same. They don't fight, but that seems to be from a lack of free time rather than a lack of will to do so or topics of disagreement. They move from Arizona to Buffalo, from Buffalo to Philly, and with every move Danny finds new facets of Sylvie to love, again clutching close the fragments of their youthful love and growing a stronger, steadier sort from the carnage. They are not the seamless Bonded Norths, with their perfectly-interlocking personalities, but they have fought and clawed for every inch of their love and take none of it for granted.

Danny sometimes feels that the shared venture of their boys binds them together more tightly than a Bond, which is why the irony of Caelan sparking the beginning of their end is not lost on him. They do not discuss Compasses in their house; that is not to say they left the boys completely ignorant, but they made it clear that a True North was just like any other act of random chance—you might find one or you might not but your life doesn't begin or end with them. They had searched when Caelan was born for fairy tales not centered around finding a North; it left them with pretty slim pickings, but it all seemed to work out and they stuck with the same set for the other two.

They give each of the boys the same brief talk explaining how the Compasses work, but they know the boy will get a deeper briefing when they get old enough in school. That day comes far too quickly for Caelan, who comes home from school one day to ask what a Null is, the capital letter clear in his young and questioning voice. This is one of the moments Danny regrets how alike he and his son are. He feels blindsided, like someone has smacked him with a fish, but Sylvie goes white as a ghost and he can hear her breath catching as she flees the kitchen, leaving Danny to explain to their child that you can love someone who isn't your North and never care to search for them. He finds Sylvie sitting on their bed. He doesn't think he's ever seen her look that small, that frail and he knows he's never seen her right arm bare like that. A year into their relationship, they had agreed to just let each other be, that they would share their compasses when they were ready. He didn’t think this moment would come, with Sylvie sobbing quietly on their bed as their kids ate a snack in the kitchen.

Her Compass was a thing of thin silver arches and curls, cool and pristine, and completely without a needle.  He feels a rush of relief quickly followed by guilt. His hands are somehow completely steady as he unwinds the bandage covering his own blank compass to show her, hoping that their shared lack will be enough to remind her of everything else they share.  Only when he gets down to the skin instead of his typical blank ring of leaves in deep greens and blues he finds  a needle an abstract swirl of navy  is moving tracking something to the Northwest. He feels his knees weaken and his vision grays a little at the edges as he clutches at the edge of the bed. He hadn't actually looked at his compass in years, he took off the cover for showers and doctors visits but he treated it pretty much like a blank patch of skin. He wonders how long the needle has been there. He wonders how he missed it. If he had looked up from that patch of skin on his forearm, he would have seen the emotions on Sylvie’s face run the gamut from shocked to angry to devastated before settling into a blank mask. By the time he looks up, she has schooled her features into something that could pass for mildly upset. She leaves to go deal with the kids who, from the sound of it, have encountered something breakable. He watches her go, frozen, stunned, with all of the breath knocked out of him like he’s just been cross-checked hard into the boards.

Sylvie spends the next few days avoiding him, which he would have noticed sooner but he was trying just as hard to avoid her. They were both only mildly successful, because three children tend to need at least some communication to maintain, but Sylvie still flinches from his touch and he still doesn't know what to say. When he was young, and maybe stupid, he had felt like his love of Sylvie was inviolable. He had been proven wrong but he had thought that the love that they had cobbled together across the years after that was pretty darn close to it.

Nights later, as they lay in bed, sharing but separate, Danny told Sylvie that he wanted her, only her, he repeated their wedding vows to her and her crumpled face gave him a small, sad smile. He was getting sick of seeing that smile, closed-mouthed with the barest tilt upward, and eyes on the edge of tears. He didn’t know how to fix this, how to convince her that she was his North as far as the word meant anything, that he would choose her over some destiny-mandated stranger, that he had chosen her the day they met and every day since.

Unable to wipe that tinge of misery from her face and slumped shoulders, he did the only thing he knew how to do: he pushed himself to be the best husband possible. He stopped going out with the guys after wins, started picking up more tasks and chores when he was home, called home every night for long drawn-out conversations with the kids and sometimes with Sylvie. It looked like it was working, she was slowly letting him back in, starting to smile and mean it, looking like his very presence didn’t pain her. But the wounded look that had crept into Sylvie’s eyes that night didn't fade, when her touches become more perfunctory than loving, and their conversations, once spanning the whole of a night, shrunk to fit into the frantic minutes of a morning getting children ready for school.

Danny is not a man of subtlety, he can read a move on the ice, but a move in his life goes right over his head. He knew this was bad, he’s not an idiot, but to think that it was something unconquerable, that this would be one time where their determination to love one another would not be enough, that this wasn’t something he could just fight harder for and win, was something he couldn’t even bear to ponder. Despite it all, sitting alone in his hotel rooms, angry and guilty and frustrated at the mess his life seems to be determined to become, he  can't resist unwrapping his arm to watch his needles gently swing, tracking some distant person. Sometimes in the melancholy of the night he thinks about them, wishes for them, someone who could belong to him, be with him. Something that had seemed so inconsequential when it was not real was starting to become a thought he couldn't get rid of. He begins wondering about the person on the other end: What are they like? What do they do? How do they feel about Norths? Do they even want to find him? But for every thought he has of his North, he has another thousand about Sylvie, about their boys and about the life he is clinging to, battling to keep. For every question about them he has an answer in Sylvie and that has to be enough.

It isn’t enough.

They start fighting, finding fault in every little thing the other one does. Nitpicking at the littlest flaw until the other one explodes. They are poking and prodding at old wounds, and Danny finds himself saying things he never thought would come out of his mouth, not to a woman he loved, still loves? He doesn’t even know anymore. Hiding out in his den, he takes comfort in the smooth dance of the navy needle against his skin. He tries even harder to be a good father, a good husband, giving it his all. He is leaving it all on the table everyday at home, and the stress and the distraction is starting to show in his game.

Some of the guys start suggesting that he pick up for a little “stress relief,” but Danny blows them off with some joke and pushes himself even harder the next day at the rink to hide what is happening. He thinks he is finally making some headway when Sylvie starts talking to him again, not to fight or complain but to reminisce about the early days of their love and how brightly it had burned. It was with relief that they talked long into the night about silly dates and stupid stories from when they were newlyweds. Danny thinks the world is finally starting to look up. Two days before their anniversary, he learns just how wrong he was. Perhaps he should have seen it coming, but he was blinded by his hope and his desperation to make this work. But while he had been trying to pull her closer, Sylvie had been pulling farther and farther away, until he finds himself staring at a stranger in his wife's body as she hands him a sheaf of papers that tell him she doesn't want him anymore.

Apparently having an active compass in a non-Bonded marriage makes for grounds for divorce in Pennsylvania. They try to keep it civil, but he fights hard for the kids because he's not going to lose them for some person he hasn't even met yet. There is something broken and tragic written in the lines of Sylvie’s body the day they finally sign, and Danny hates the words “They lived happily ever after” just a little bit more.

* * *

 

When Danny is thirty-two, he is divorced, living alone, has three kids he loves hopelessly and knows somewhere out there is a person meant to make him whole. He wishes they would hurry up.

 

After the divorce, Danny had put some distance between himself and the guys. Some of it was intentional and the rest was just a by-product of his less-than-pleasant attitude of late. Danny has always had a nasty temper, and he hasn’t exactly been keeping a firm hold on his tongue, on the ice or off. All of this means that Danny has no idea how or when he got appointed the designated rookie wrangler for bar nights with the team, but he can only assume it’s some sort of punishment. There Danny is sitting at the opposite end of the bar from the rest of the guys, enjoying a scotch only slightly older than his boys and doing what Hartsy calls his “wounded-animal” act, when he finds himself with a pile of drunken hockey players leaning their not-inconsequential bulk into Danny’s side, almost knocking the drink from his hand. Danny tries to right the closest guy’s balance, muttering to himself about goalies and directional control. He is used to dealing with drunken people much larger than himself, and this is not the first time someone north of six feet has tried to make his lap their home, but it is certainly the most annoying. He has some success, even though he cannot understand a word any of them are saying. Danny thinks it might be Russian, though with his luck, this kid is Czech or something. Either way, he hopes he can still understand enough English to tell what Danny is saying. He is halfway out from under him, trying to wrangle Bob’s tall frame into the chair next to him, preparing to deal with the others, when a riot of red curls enters his line of sight. Claude smells like beer and a little like tequila, but his hands are firm and steady as he helps Danny get their goalie stable.

“Thanks,” Danny mutters.

“Looked like you could use a little help.” Claude has a little smirk curling up his lips that Danny, against his better judgement, finds cute.

“What about the rest of this lot?” Danny asks, gesturing at the somnolent pile of drunkards clinging to the edge of the bar. He is amused to identify them as their third line.

“Well, they look pretty comfortable where they are, non?” Claude is grinning now.

Danny sighs. “We should get them in a cab back to the hotel. Tomorrow morning is already going to be a shitshow as it is. Where the hell is Ritchie? This is normally his schtick.”

“He say it was time to pay the piper? or something like that. I don’t know he was being all—” Claude waves his hand about, as if that would somehow describe the moods of Mike Richards. Weirdly enough, it does.

“Alright then. I’ll call a car, you watch them, bien?”

Claude grins at him and pulls a sharpie out of his pocket.  “Maybe I make them regret being so silly?”

“How about you call the cars and I stay with them?”

“You’re no fun,” says Claude, pouting, but still following Danny’s orders.

Almost an hour later, Claude and Danny have managed to get all of the guys back to their rooms more or less unscathed, which is more than he can say for the suit Claude had started the night out in. His jacket had been an unfortunate casualty of vomit on the car ride back and his pants had gotten hit on the elevator.

 

“How did you manage to get through all this, and look,” Claude says, gesturing to Danny’s entire form, “you are not hit at all.”

Danny finds himself laughing at the disgruntled look on Claude’s face, suddenly feeling less old and tired and infinitely less sorry for himself.

“Well I should go and clean up, but maybe next time we can get a beer together?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

Danny goes to bed that night with a lightness in his chest and dreams of red curls.

* * *

 

That is not the last time that Danny finds himself assisting the guys home after a night on the town. But it is the last time that he gets to sit alone at the bar. Claude sticks to him like some sort of barnacle after that first night, always by his side, always ready to help Danny get everyone home at the end of the night. It makes Danny feel a little guilty for the way he had been acting, but mostly he feels happy that Claude wants to spend time with him. He’s not some sort of teenaged girl, he can handle his feelings for his teammate without needing them to turn into anything more than that, but he does have to admit to himself that he really does enjoy Claude’s company. Some nights, the two of them don’t even go out with the guys, they just sit in one of their room, usually Danny’s, and hang out. Most nights they just shoot the shit, talking about nothing of any real meaning, but some nights they break out the hard liquor and talk about deeper things. The subject of compasses never comes up, something Danny is infinitely grateful for. It is on one such night that Danny comes to discover just how lonely Claude really feels in Philly, a city still foreign to him for all that he’s been in and out of it for a year or so now. The conversation sparks an idea within him, this little niggling itch of there being something more he can do.

The season ends more with a whimper than with a bang, but Danny has bigger things on his mind than hockey in this postseason. His compass has been moving more and more every time he sees it, which he admits, if only to himself, is not all that often. Children are taught in school that movement like that means you are getting close to your North. Danny honestly doesn’t know what to do about this person out there, someone he knows he might love more than anything, but already hates more than just a little. Someone who is probably searching for him, not knowing that on the other end of their search is just a bitter divorcé who plays a children’s game for money. In his darker moments, he thinks he would feel bad for that person, but he figures that the Diviner or whoever gets to make these kind of decisions knew enough to give Danny to the kind of person who deserves Danny.

Any way you cut it, that person, his North, is creeping closer, and Danny is afraid that this fragile thing he’s been building, barely aware of it, between himself and Claude cannot handle the pressure of what they will bring with them. After locker cleanout day, he and Claude go out to lunch, just the two of them. Danny finds himself fascinated by the way Claude sits, all coiled energy, like a predator at rest, and hypnotized by the way he talks with his hands, something the media team has yet to train him out of. Danny finds himself thinking guiltily about how young Claude seems in these moments, just between the two of them. How young he actually is. Danny leaves that lunch with a lot more on his mind than the lackluster end of the season.

 

He ponders it all in the offseason. On the one hand he would love to have Claude closer, but he’s barely hanging on to his moral high ground here as it is. In the end it’s the boys that decide it for him. They re-enter his life in a whirlwind of practices and playdates and school projects. Somehow adding one more person to the mix seems like it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. And it’s not like he doesn’t have the space. Having Claude there soothes something inside Danny that he didn’t know was sore. Danny doesn’t know how a person could have managed to be lonely with three teenage boys and half a hockey team in and out of his house, but he had been, he thinks. The boys are on board, somehow more easygoing than either of their parents. They love having someone new around, and, to quote Cameron, “Someone more interesting to talk to than you, Dad.”

* * *

 

Hartsy pulls him aside one day after skate while he’s on his way to the bikes. His face is serious, which off the ice is not exactly a common occurrence, and it sets Danny a little on edge. That looming thing he pulls doesn’t exactly calm him down.

“What are you pulling with the kid?”

“What kid, wait, Claude?”

“Of course, Claude.”

“What do you mean pulling?”

“You’ve got him all twisted up on you, man, and if you’re not going to do something real soon then let the kid down easy now, yeah?”

Danny is stunned. “I-I’m not pulling anything, Hartsy, he just lives in my house! He’s barely older than my kids!”

Hartsy snorts, “Danny, man, I say this as someone who actually gives a shit about you, get your head out of your ass. You’ve got great vision, use it.”

“There is nothing to see,” Danny argues.

The look Hartsy gives him is pitying as he sqeezes Danny’s shoulder. “Okay, Danny, just think about it, eh?”

Danny shrugs off his hands, rankled by the implication that he was someone to be pitied. He is doing just fine on his own. He doesn’t need his North and he certainly doesn’t need his decade younger teammate to love him back. He can be happy on his own, and taunting him with things he can’t have like this is just cruel. Hartsy can clearly read some of this on his face and he raises his hands in supplication and backs away.

“It’s your life, Danny, but you’re not the only one in it. Just be careful you’re not making a mistake.” With that admonishment hanging in the still air of the hallway, Harsty turns and walks away.

“Hartsy! I’m not making a mistake,” Danny calls after him.

Harsty doesn’t turn back around, only hums an acknowledgement that he heard him and doesn’t believe him. For a split second, the anger that has been building in Danny since this conversation began abates, and he considers that he might be wrong about this, but hell, even if he is, Danny’s life is too complicated to tangle another person in, even one as enticing as Claude Giroux. Danny has walked this road before and he knows that he doesn’t have it in him to watch another person walk away from him, because of the compass on his arm. Danny sighs and buries his face in his hands, groaning. Why does his life have to be so complicated? He knows he brought some of this on himself, but really, he has enough on his plate with the three boys without adding all of this North nonsense to the business. Thinking of the boys makes Danny look at his phone and realize he is late to pick them up from Sylvie’s. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and sees two missed calls from Sylvie and one from Claude. With a ball of dread sinking in his stomach like a stone in a lake, he dials the number for voicemail.

“Daniel.” He has always hated being called Daniel and she knows this. It had been an endearing quirk when they were married; now it just feels like a barb. “I am just calling to remind you to come and get the boys and that we changed the time to three. I have an important meeting at work so please be on time.” Danny winces and presses the button for the next message.

“Daniel, I have to leave for work in twenty minutes. If you are not here in ten minutes, I have to take the boys with me.” Sylvie sounds frazzled in the message and, as always, it makes Danny feel instantly guilty. “Please hurry up.” He thinks she is done but then her voice starts up again, sounding quieter and a little sad “Daniel—” Here she sighs, “I know your life is very busy but the boys were really looking forward to their time with you and I just, ugh, I wish you could just put them in front of hockey every once and awhile.” Now ,feeling dread creeping up his spine, Danny hits next on his phone while hastily shoving his gear back into its bags.

“Hi Danny, it’s Claude. Umm, I hope this isn’t an imposition or anything, but you and Hartsy seemed kinda busy after practice, and, well, Carson called me to tell me you were late picking them up so I, well, I went and got them from Sylvie’s. We picked up dinner on the way home—don’t worry, I got some things with vegetables—and Cameron is telling me to ask you if you could pick up that smoothie he likes, the one with the mangoes? Anyway don’t panic about the boys or anything. See you at home.”

Home, he called Danny’s house, the place they lived together, Home. Danny feels frozen in place, somehow ecstatic and shattered all at once. He hits play and listens to the message again. Savouring the rounded vowels and cut-off consonants that mirror his own. Danny wants to wrap himself in the tones of Claude’s voice. Danny wants to kill himself for mooning over a voicemail like some sort of starry-eyed child. Danny wants to hear Claude’s voice calling the place he shares with Danny Home every day for the rest of his life. Danny wants to never hear him say it that way again. Danny wants a lot of things, he is a complex person. He contains multitudes, or whatever it is that author and his grass leaves said. It is just that some of the things he wants, so many of them these days, he knows he cannot have.  But he can be weak, can pretend for this one night that he is going home to Claude and his boys, that they are a family, something permanent, bound by relations and more importantly love.

 

* * *

 

Claude does nothing but further cement his place in Danny’s life and his heart over the next few months. He has integrated himself into the fabric of the household seamlessly enough that Danny honestly doesn’t remember how it all worked when Claude wasn’t there to pick up the slack. He plays video games with the boys on nights when they have them (getting beat miserably each time), and eventually they break most nights for rounds of floor hockey in the den, which sometimes finds Danny playing the role of goalie. He attends their varying levels of hockey practice with good humor and dispenses advice and autographs with equal aplomb to both the waiting parents and the boys’ teammates. Nine times out of ten, Claude is the one who picks up a suitably nutritious dinner (or makes the boys grilled cheese, his only culinary success) and more often than not Claude becomes the one dropping the boys off at Sylvie’s on his way to the rink. Really it is all going so well with Claude and Sylvie and the boys that Danny is lured into a false sense of security—a feeling that is rudely shattered by the announcement of a potential NHL lockout. The news puts a damper on any plans they had been making for that next season, and makes Claude somehow both clingy and withdrawn. His lurk-and-flee attitude grates on Danny’s already fraying nerves until he finally snaps.

“What has gotten into you?”

“I am, uh, getting offers.”

“Offers?”

“From other teams. Not NHL teams, teams in Europe, they want me to come play for them if there’s a lockout.”

“Okay?” Danny replies, not really getting why this is such a problem.

“Well, I don’t want to just take one and drop out on you and the boys. That wouldn’t be fair to you or them.” Danny thinks he hears a muttered “or me” but writes it off as wishful thinking.

“You don't have to make a decision right now, do you?”

“Non.”

“Well then why don’t I reach out to my agent and see if maybe our lists match up anywhere. That way we can all go somewhere.”

The smile on Claude’s face is blinding and Danny can feel a matching one form on his own.

“There now, that wasn't so bad, was it?”

Claude looks a little bashful as he shrugs his assent.

“Good, now let's solve something harder, like what to get for dinner.”

“Not Thai, we’ve had it three times in the past two weeks and my meal plan is going to shit.”

“You have been looking a little thick around the middle,” Danny shoots back smirking.

“Hey! I’ll have you know this is a perfect six-pack,” Claude declares, pulling up his shirt and gesturing to his abdomen.

“Just looking out for your health,” Danny replies, breezily slapping Claude’s stomach as he passes the redhead, snickering at his surprised squawk and ignoring the way his hand wants to linger on the taut warm skin of his abs.

* * *

 

Being in Europe is somehow freeing. All of the Germans walk around with their arms bare, but no one is looking. There are no Match-Bars, no meet up points, no people desperate in the street running after a person in a random direction. They are all strangely calm about the idea of not meeting their North until they are old and grey. Danny couldn’t help but ask one of their German teammates why they all keep their compasses out in the open. The man had seemed so startled by the question.

“They are your North, no? So,” he shrugs, ”they will find you when the time is right.”

This cavalier attitude about Norths speaks to something in Danny and he finds himself wearing his cover less and less. Claude looks startled the first time he sees Danny’s arm bare, but never asks, and Danny never asks about the armguard that is basically super-glued to his arm the entire time they are there.

* * *

 

Claude is moving out. Danny hears the words but they don’t seem to make any sense, and his brain scrambles to rearrange them in some sort of order that doesn’t end up with Claude packing his things back into boxes and walking out the door. Claude says all kind of things about needing his space and learning to live on his own. Danny is unprepared, has no defense against this, and so he stands back and lets the movers through to pick up Claude’s things and carry them out of the house, out of their home, Danny’s home now. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t watch this happen. He sits in his room listening to the sounds of the house below him as Claude is removed from his house piece by piece, and he lets himself wonder if someday he’ll be enough to keep, North or no North.

* * *

 

“Umm, Dad, do you have a minute?”

Danny puts down his book and takes off his reading glasses. “Of course boys. What’s up?”

There is a silence that is somewhat more anticipatory than awkward but still makes Danny uncomfortable. Cameron elbows Carson, who in turn elbows Caelan, who sighs and rolls his eyes.

“Ok. Dad, I have, we have, something we need to talk to you about.” The way Caelan says it as if he has bitten into something both sour and slimey does nothing to silence the many alarms ringing in Danny’s head right now.

“Alright, boys, spit it out, what is it?”

“Well,” Caelan begins rubbing vigorously at his compass arm, a nervous twitch that Danny is afraid he picked up from him. “You know how they tell you in school that you can go your whole life liking—”

“Loving,” Carson cuts in, grinning.

Caelan’s eyes must always get a thorough workout, with his brothers making him roll them as often as they do, Danny thinks, amused at his children even as he worries about them.

“Do you want to do this?”

“It just seemed more appropriate,” Carson protests.

“Fine, loving” Caelan concedes with a sigh, “a certain type of person, like, say, people who hate peanuts, but then you find your North and they’re a completely different kind of person, they love peanuts, and—”

“That’s a terrible example,” Carson complains.

“Alright, fine. You try, Mr. Wordsmith.”

Danny had been instantly suspicious of the shifty way the boys are standing and the way they seem not to want to meet his eyes, but now he is starting to get actively worried, his mind spinning out thousands of what-if’s.

Carson clears his throat and straightens up like he’s about to present to his class or something. “Ok, Dad, so what Caelan was trying to say was you know how there are all of those stories of your North being exactly the opposite of what you’d expect.” Carson is meeting his eyes now, with an intensity that Danny has honestly never seen from him before. Whatever this is, it is very important to his kids.

“Like those folk tales of a sheriff in the wild west Bonding to a bandit or the one about Aaron what’s his name and Hamilton and, and, and, well that’s all I have.”

Now he looks a little sheepish, but Danny has a feeling he is starting to understand what the boys are getting at. He had hoped that the boys would be older before they met their Norths, and he had always imagined Sylvie with him for this, but he guesses he’s just going to have to wing it.

He tries to ask this as gently as possible. “Caelan, you should never have to be ashamed of your North and you can feel free—why are you making that face?”

“Daaad, this was not about my North,” Caelan says sounding every inch the put-upon teenager he was, “I haven’t even met them yet.”

Danny sits back. Now he has no idea what this conversation is about.

“Ok, so if we aren’t talking about your North, then what exactly is all this,” he asks, gesturing at the boys’ general area, “about?”

Now the boys look shifty again, and finally Cameron mutters something to himself that sounds like “stupid brothers, stupid plan” before straightening up. “Dad. We are talking about how you’re being an idiot about your North.”

“My North? Boys, you know I haven’t found my North ye-”

“Claude.”

“What?”

“Claude is your North.” Cameron replies insistently.

“Boys, I know you mean well but it isn’t fair to—”

“Dad.” Caelan cuts him off, “We have watched, and every time you have your guard off it has pointed right at him. We even asked Hartsy and Simmer to check. They saw it too.”

Danny feels hope blooming in his chest.  “Boys, are you sure?” he asks, as seriously as he ever has anything in his life. He is so happy, so really truly excited he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

All three nod so vigorously Danny fears for their necks.

* * *

 

He finds himself standing in front of the door to Claude’s apartment without knowing how he got there. He looks down at his compass. The needle is pointing right at the door. He steels himself and knocks.

Claude opens the door with his hand already out with money.

“Yeah, can you put the pizzas down on the—Danny? What are you doing here?”

“I-I think you’re my North, Claude, you are my other half, all this time I have been pushing you away instead of pulling you closer and I am sorry, so sorry, because you were always meant to be mine.”

Claude’s eyes are wary when he replies, “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t know. You have to believe me, I never wanted to look for my North. I didn’t want to look for them, Claude, because they weren’t you.”

“I can’t be your North, Danny,” Claude says, and his face is pained, “I’m a Null.”

“I don’t care,” pleads Danny desperately. “I wanted you when you weren’t my North and I want you now. It doesn’t matter. I love you either way.”

Claude makes a noise that Danny would later call a whimper, though only out of earshot of his red-headed North, and surges forward.

They meet in an imperfect kiss, a clash of teeth and tongues that would have been embarrassing had it not felt so damn good. As Danny wraps his arms around Claude, pulling him closer, he can feel the beginnings of their bond settling into place like a warm spot of sunlight in the back of his mind.

A polite cough startles them and they break their kiss. Both Schenns come rocketing out of the doorway behind Claude, making a beeline for the interrupting pizza-man.

“Hey Danny!”

“Congrats dude! Pizza’s here!”

Claude groans and rests his forehead against Danny’s. “Pizza?”

Danny chuckles and pecks him on the cheek. “Sure. Why not.”

 

* * *

 

Even after all these years apart, Sylvie still knows him like the back of her hand, which is why, when he swings by to pick up the boys for hockey practice that afternoon, he has to take a moment to prepare himself, to put up a reasonable façade to show her. Claude is too new a thing to be sharing with the rest of the world, even a corner of it so close to his heart as Sylvie. All of his work is for nothing, however. She sees right through him, hustling him aside while the boys threw their many bags into the back of his SUV.

“What happened? Did you—did you finally find them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talk abou—”

“Daniel, it’s me you’re talking to here? I know you. You have a glow, I haven’t seen you this happy, well, since our wedding day.”

“Oh hell, Sylvie,” he says, running a hand through his hair, “I don’t know what I am. I found him and he’s wonderful, perfect, really, in all the ways that matter, but there’s all of these things that everyone’s assuming, and goddamnit I’ve never had a relationship with a man before.” Now he sighs, rubbing his temples “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“Oh, Danny,” and that right there is the smile that had slain him, all sweet and sad with a hint of mocking humor, “you never know what you are doing in a relationship—we certainly didn’t.”

“Yes, exactly, and look at how that turned out!”

“What with three wonderful children that you love, with you happy and with your North? How terrible for you,” she says, smile morphing into a playful smirk.

“I was happy with you!” he shouts. He can hear the children’s conversation behind him fall silent, and he knows this is not the time, not the place, but he is so confused and so angry still, so hurt, and he didn’t know it until just then. He wilts, whispering, “I was happy with you. Until you decided I wasn’t.” Now his voice grows stronger again. “I loved you, Sylvie, and yes, Claude is my North, my perfect other half, and whatever other nonsense Divinistes are spouting these days, but, for Pole’s sake, I didn’t need him to make me happy. So please don’t act like you did me some sort of favor by breaking my heart.”

Her face is frozen in an expression he has never seen from her before as she woodenly says, “Daniel, I did what I thought was right, and if you feel that way still after all of this time, then I think it is time for you to go. And maybe—maybe next time, have Claude pick the boys up.”

Danny stands there paralyzed with a mix of frustration, confusion and anger bubbling in his gut as she walks over to the boys, says goodbye and returns to her house, all without looking at him. He sees the boys still standing by the car, looking between him and the now-closed door of the house, shoulders hunched and eyes uncertain. Looking at their faces he knows he needs to pull himself together about this and face the music, or at least the judgement of his three boys, something he feels just barely prepared for after game interviews and bizarrely intrusive media scrums. After catching the look on Caelen’s face as he herds the boys into the SUV and buckles up, he reassesses his readiness for this conversation and thinks if this whole hockey thing doesn’t work out for his son, he could make a killing as a hockey reporter. The car ride maintains a truly unusual silence that has Danny’s teeth gritted and shoulders tensed in anticipation as he pulls out of the driveway and turns back towards the highway.

Carson is the one who finally breaks the silence, looking down and fidgeting with the pocket on his hoodie.

“Dad?”

Danny winces at how small he sounds. “Yeah, bud?”

“Is maman super mad about the vase?”

“The vase?”

Cameron smacks him upside the head. “Great going idiot, he didn’t know we broke it,” he hisses.

Caelan rolls his eyes and calls back to them, “Well now he does.”

“You think we were arguing over—over a vase?” Danny has to pull over to the side of the road, he finds himself laughing so hard with relief that he can feel tears gathering in his eyes. He tries to get himself back under control, sure that the children are freaking out now if they weren’t before. “No, boys, your maman is not angry about the vase, or at least she didn’t tell me, and I saw that fist pump, Carson—don’t think that we won’t be discussing how exactly you broke that vase at length at some point—but your mother and I were not arguing about that. It was just a little difference of opinion, not even a real argument, nothing to worry about.” He can see the disbelief in the older two’s eyes. He forgot sometimes that they had lived through the divorce and remembered the dark days just prior, filled with whispered bickering and not-so-carefully hidden arguments. Time to deploy distraction tactics. “Now let’s talk about that vase, eh?”

* * *

 

“Danny, she is one of the most important people in your life, the actual mother of your children, don’t use this, don’t use me, as some sort of way to fuck this up, you self-deprecating idiot. I know that you don’t like talking about your feelings, hell, without the pre-Bond I wouldn’t know jack about how you’re feeling half the time, but I can feel this and this is stupid, and I think there has been enough stupid between the three of us to last a lifetime.” Claude has the temper that matches his hair and is demonstrating it to full effect, pacing, almost shouting, arms gesticulating everywhere.

Danny is startled into silence by Claude’s response. He expected Claude to be on his side with this. But here he is getting the sort of ultimatum that used to make him balk with Sylvie and he isn’t exactly a fan of it coming from Claude, even though he can feel the man’s upset.  He isn’t really sure what to do with this. His uncertainty must come through their fragile bond, because Claude just scoffs and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him. It turns out, going to bed angry works just fine if you like apology sex, and Danny finds that Claude’s blowjobs can be a touch more convincing than his rants.

* * *

 

Danny has never been a subtle man, he wears his emotions on his sleeves, and Claude, well, Clude wouldn’t know subtle if it bit him on the ass, which coincidentally is right about where Danny left the hickey that breaks the camel's back. Something he comes to regret right around the time he comes back into the locker room after morning skate and finds both Schenn’s and Simmer teasing Claude about it.

“Daaamn, G, that must have been some chick.” Danny feels his cheeks flame with embarrassment.

“Leave it alone, Simmer,” Claude growls.

“What, G, don’t want us all to know you got a little freaky last night?”

“Leave. It.”

Kimmo catches Danny’s eye and nods at Claude, asking if he should go help. Danny shrugs. He isn’t sure what do, they haven’t really hashed out what exactly they are going to tell the team. And they certainly haven't discussed telling the whole locker room about their sex life, but the Finn seems to understand that and moves quickly across the room, slapping both Schenns upside the head as he went.

“We should all be more concerned with the scoring that is on the ice than off it, no?” Kimmo winks at Claude.

The room erupts with laughter and the tension visibly leaves Claude’s shoulders. Danny breathes a sigh of relief.

\--------------------

They lose the first round of the playoffs. They had been so close and yet, once again, so far. Danny isn’t sure how many more of these runs he has in him. Laying in bed that night feeling every one of his 35 years bearing down on him in the form of bruises and aching joints, he cannot help but feel like he is running out of time. Hockey is a young man’s game and he knows he hasn’t fit that mold for a few years running now.  But with Claude curled into his side, heavy and warm, he thinks that a future after hockey might not be so scary. He lays there letting his thoughts drift to charities he wants to help run and being able to attend all of the PTA events that his boy’s schools host, but it feels a little off, until he realizes that every one of these visions is sans one very important redhead.

He presses a kiss to said mass of coppery curls before broaching a subject that he’s really not sure about.

“Hey, Clo?”

“Hmmm...?” Claude replies, half asleep.

“How would you feel about maybe telling people about us, and what we are to each other?”

Claude sits bolt upright in bed, all traces of lax sleepiness gone from his frame. “Danny, what are you asking?”

“I just, I am going to retire soon—”

“Never.”

“I am going to retire soon and I want to be able to have a life with my Mate without having to hide or fabricate some girl out there who I think might be my North, ya know?”

“Danny—”

“I just, I am getting too old to be pulling this shit.”

“C’mere,” Claude pulls him over for a kiss. His lips are a dry firm press against Danny’s in what is an oddly chaste kiss for the two of them. “Of course we can tell people.” Now he grins, showing off his trademark gap. “I’ve just been waiting for you to get yourself together enough to want to.”

* * *

 

Danny wipes his sweating hands on his suit pants cursing the way the tweed shows the moisture. He brushes ineffectually at the thighs and somehow manages to make it worse. He gives it up for a lost cause; he’s going to be sitting for most of this anyway. He’s pacing, shoulders tight, lips pursed, when the door at one end of the hallway swings open to reveal a freshly washed and besuited Claude. He can’t quite help how his eyes catch on the way the still-damp curls sit at the base of his neck, looking so soft, the way the suit he had chosen strains at the shoulder battling the redhead’s summer bulk. The man looks good enough to devour, and it takes no small amount of self-control on Danny’s part to convince himself not to do just that. They have to be out in public in a few minutes, and Danny doesn’t think the PR team would appreciate them going out there mid-coitus. He reaches for Claude’s hand and finds himself pulled into a hug.

“You seemed like you needed relaxing,” Claude murmurs into the side of his head. Danny sighs and lets himself lean into Claude’s warmth for a moment before pulling back.

“Alright, Let’s go face the music.” Danny grins up meeting his matching gap-toothed grin.

They clasp hands and walk out the doors to begin their Bonding ceremony.

Danny is sure that it is a very nice ceremony and there will be tons of footage of it later based on the number of cameras, but he can’t look away from the very lovely man he is about to Bond to.

Claude smirks at him as they reach the end of the aisle. “You ready?”

“Always,” Danny shoots back, sure there is a smirk of his own on his face.

“Are you ready to state your vows?” asks the Joiner.

They both nod and the Joiner gestures at Claude to begin.

“I love you Danny. I have loved you from the day I met you even though I didn’t know it. I love the nasty smirk you get on the ice when you drive your stick butt into some guy’s face. I love your wit and your speed and the soft little smile you get when one of the kids does something amusing, and the gently caring face you have when you watch them sometimes. I love that you can cook like a bajillion meals but have trouble with a grilled cheese. And that while you claim that the boys love it, The Lion King is actually your favorite movie. The longer I know you, the more I find to love. It is my honor and my joy to be your North.”

 

When Danny is 35 he finally understands the fairytales of his childhood. He is complete, with all of his rough edges aligning and his compass always points Home.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As always massive kudos to my amazingly fantastic non-fandom beta thedronesneedyou who populated my writing with commas and correct turns of phrase.


End file.
